Brussels or Bruxelles?
It doesn't matter, I love them both with the same love.
I used to live in this city and I have many memories there, forged over the years with students who became comrades and then friends. Friends from all corners of Belgium, from Flanders to the confines of Wallonia, and also from neighbouring Holland, wherever the Platteland beer flows.
It's been a long time since I last trod the old suspended tatami of the ULB, and I'll be happy to renew contact with this figure of Brussels' heritage on 22 and 23 March.
Life is change, I'm no longer the same person who used to teach at Solbosch. Thirty years ago I put a lot of heart into passing on knowledge that I actually knew nothing about. Youth is necessary, it's seductive, it has its audience of course, who applaud, and its followers, but the reality is that it takes time for a teacher to reach the maturity and mastery of his art.
What occupies me now has nothing in common with the interests and certainties of the young teacher I was, whose image is fading from my memory. What occupies me is a far cry from the multiple forms, necessary or absurd, under which Aikido is known today - disguised, I should say. For Aikido is not to be found in the irrelevant teaching methods, which are all false trails, nor is it to be found in the legitimate teaching methods, which are nonetheless necessary to its discovery. Aikido is beyond this, it is as secret as a woman who wants to be conquered, and who will not surrender herself either to the suitor who takes no risks, or to the one who is in too much of a hurry. Conquest requires faith, and perhaps recklessness; you have to open your heart, without fear; you also need constancy, and to wait for the right moment.
I waited a long time, all the time I needed to shake off my cloak of parasitic feelings and knowledge. I did this salutary work alone, and what I received was not given to me, nor did I rob it, I found it. What I now teach has nothing in common with what is generally taught under the name of Aikido, whether at the Tokyo Aikikai or in the village of Iwama, which are alas like Charybdis and Scylla. What I teach now, thanks to those who were my masters - Morihiro Saito, Pierre Chassang and Perseverance - is Ueshiba's Aikido, and that's all it is.
There's no need to say how highly I regard sporting federations, is there? But if there are practitioners who are still interested in the Aikido of Morihei Ueshiba, far away from the honourable heritage of the Daito Ryu, as well as from the delirium of modern Aikido (the pathological loss of the sense of reality), they are welcome on the tatami where I teach. Whatever their affiliation, it's not an obstacle.
Lastly, it would be a pleasure to meet up again on this occasion with all those whom the years or circumstances have distanced from me. Life transforms us, but the bonds that were forged just once are not undone by time, because energy weaves, never breaks.
Philippe Voarino
Antibes, 23 January 2025
